Review: In a Handbag, Darkly, theSpace on North Bridge (Venue 36)

By David Pollock
Published on 27/08/2012 15:38

No MATTER how conceited or foolhardy a venture writing a sequel to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest might be, this piece from playwright Robin Johnson and director Tim Murphy deserves credit for winning doubters over in confident style.

* * * *

Johnson – who has previously riffed on Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Shelley at the Fringe with Broken Holmes and Stitched Up – was never going to match Wilde for wit, so instead his clever play recycles some of the material from the original, adds its own absurdity and works as an almost metatextual critique of the drawing room comedy.

The play opens where Wilde’s left off, brothers Jack and Algernon having won the hearts of Gwendolen and Cecily. It doesn’t last long: Cecily – declaring “a girlish whim is a commitment one cannot back out of” – wants to travel to Rhodesia, where mercenaries will train her to be a human weapon. Gwendolen, meanwhile, is considering the family way: “We’re Victorians, darling; inbreeding is nothing to worry about.”

Yet Jack wasn’t the only child abandoned at Victoria Station, and a third brother – raised on a diet of rainwater and mint imperials while a clerk refuses to free him without a left-luggage ticket because “it’s more than my job’s worth” – is out for revenge, having orchestrated an uprising of the servant classes from his leather-handled bolthole on the concourse.

John and Algernon’s manservants, Merriman and Lane, an excellent and versatile piece of dual-role acting by Will Naameh, are both in on the act, as is the vicar, who is told a drawing room revolution will mean no more drawing room comedies and no more ending up in his underwear for the amusement of audiences. It’s all incredibly silly, but cleverly and amusingly so.

Until today, 8:10pm.